Spoiler alert: The farther west you go, the startup population (and the population itself) grows more scattered.
For all our flaws, independent angels serve the important role of enabling the "genetic diversity" of the startup population.
Our intent was to see whether educational backgrounds of unicorn and near-unicorn leaders differ markedly from the broad startup CEO population.
To explain the birth of firms or startup ventures, biology and population ecology are theoretically applied to describe a system as a business ecosystem.
Mobile payments moved from the talk of the startup community to greater population thanks to Starbucks and Square.
"The New York market can be a trap for food and meal delivery startups as the population density can create outsized order and revenue growth that is difficult to replicate in additional cities as the company expands," he told me via email.
While population growth and startup growth are both rising in many metro areas, what is really happening is that these startup ecosystems, moribund a few years ago, are finally coming into their own.
However, when we make an apples-to-apples comparison between the Bay Area, the NYC metro area and the rest of the United States, we see something more striking: There's a fairly even distribution of startup funding within each regional population.
Integral to the city's startup culture is its large student population.
Even a modestly successful startup has a user base comparable in population to nation-states.
